Something had changed, and perhaps it was him. Morpheus removed his small pince-nez sunglasses. Maybe if they could see his eyes, they’d trust him more?

The door opened. The latest potential recruit walked in. A skinny guy who hadn’t seen the sun in months. He sat down, frowned at his phone, placed it face-down on the table.

Rain splattered the windows. Morpheus let the silence do its work, as usual. “Welcome, Neo. I am Morpheus. I imagine that right now, you’re feeling a bit like Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole. Hmm?”

Neo shrugged. “Honestly, I just followed that girl because I thought there might be snacks.” Neo’s phone vibrated. “Is this like an escape game or something? Because it’s late and I’ve got an eight-a.m. stand-up.”

“Time is an illusion, Neo.”

“My boss Nigel isn’t.”

“I assure you,” said Morpheus, dragging the sentence out. “Nigel is an illusion, however compelling. But you have the look of a man who accepts what he sees because he expects to wake up.”

Neo nodded. “Alarm’s set for 6:45. I expect to wake up well-rested too. Got a great new mattress.”

“That’s not—”

“A Casper. Do you want a coupon? NEO15 will get you free pillowcases.”

Morpheus had been interrupted before, but he’d never been offered a discount code. The script, he should just stick to the script. “Do you believe in fate, Neo?”

“I read The Secret in 2012. It gave me an ulcer. Does that count?”

Morpheus cracked his knuckles. “You are here because you know something. What you know, you cannot explain. But you feel it. Like a splinter in your mind. That there is something wrong with the—”

“Climate change?”

“No.”

“Microplastics?”

“No.”

“The phones. It’s the phones, isn’t it?”

Morpheus took a long breath. Usually, these were to signify gravity—the on-rushing of the irreversible. But this one, like many lately, was born of frustration. “I am talking of The Matrix. It is all around us. You can feel it when you go to work. When you—”

“I work from home.”

“You are a slave, Neo. Born into a prison that you cannot smell, or taste, or touch. A prison — for your mind.”

Beneath the table, Neo’s thumbs were moving. The phone was back in his hands.

“What are you doing?”

Neo looked up, caught out. “Nothing. Sorry. Continue.”

“Are you searching for me?”

“You’ve got no footprint at all, Morph. Can I call you Morph?”

“No.”

“Not even a LinkedIn. Which usually means either witness protection or Amish.”

Morpheus gripped the smooth edge of his jacket. He was a churner of minds, not butter. “I only exist outside the Matrix, Neo.” From his pocket, he produced his case. It never failed to focus them. “This is your last chance. No turning back. You take the blue pill, the story ends: you wake in your own bed and believe whatever you wish to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.”

“Cool.” Neo nodded, squinting at the pills as if they were unfamiliar mushrooms. “But can I offer a quick bit of feedback?”

Morpheus felt his eyebrows knit, then knot.

“The urgency thing.” Neo air-quoted. “‘Last chance.’ ‘No turning back.’ It’s very 1990s sofa sale. Just saying.”

“All I am offering you is the truth.”

Neo gestured to the two pills. “And are they benzos? I do really badly on benzos.”

Morpheus blinked several times and then, like a machine restarting after a critical error, resumed from the top. “If you take the blue pill, you wake in your own bed.”

Neo smiled. “Egyptian cotton. So that’s nice.”

“If you take the red pill, I’ll show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.”

Neo’s shoulders lifted. “Do you think you could just… tell me instead? Seems like all the risk is mine, is the thing.”

“Your mind can’t withstand the full truth. It will be revealed to you in stages.”

“That sounds super cult-y.”

Morpheus let out a booming laugh. “You are already in the cult. I offer you liberation from it.”

“Said every cult leader ever. Maybe you have some slides, then? Or an online course? I could become enlightened at my own pace. Without the drugs.”

“Zion does not offer online courses.”

“What’s Zion exactly?”

“Our true home.”

“This Zion. Is it walkable?”

“Walkable?” Morpheus laughed once more. “It is at war.”

“Ugh. With whom?”

“The machines.”

“AI? My copywriter friend Dave just lost his job. It’s rough.”

“War where metal sentinels tear human flesh.”

“Well, not in my name. How’s that war working out?”

“Poorly,” Morpheus said, commending himself on his honesty. On upholding his promise never to lie to them. “That is why we need you. There is a prophecy.”

Neo winced. “Okay, L. Ron.”

“I ask nothing of you that I have not given myself.”

“How old were you when they offered you the pills?”

“Nineteen.”

Neo nodded, and went on nodding, but said nothing. Morpheus understood that something had been conceded, but he didn’t know what.

“Look — it’s not you. It’s just I’ve done this before.”

Morpheus leaned forward. His jacket squeaked. “You have not done this before.”

“I have.” Neo started counting on his fingers. “The unpaid internships. Following my passion. Learning to code. Crypto. Kratom. Podcast. Peptides. Ice baths. Four hundred dollars for a course about how to sell courses. I’ve taken so many red pills, Mo. Every single one started with some version of wake up. And every single one made somebody else rich.”

Morpheus found that his head had become inexplicably heavy. “You have made yourself so difficult to fool,” he said quietly, “that you have made yourself impossible to reach.”

Neo picked up his phone, tapped it three times, and put it back face-down. “Maybe. But I’m in an okay place. Therapy’s finally working. I’ve got a golden retriever called Bartrum who’s thrilled when I come—”

“Bartrum is a projection of electrical impulses into your cortex.”

“No code could simulate morning breath like his.” He smiled. “My partner and I just locked in a decent fixed rate. We’ve got health insurance. At nineteen, I’d have taken both your pills. You and I would be tripping balls in Zion.”

“You bought a home inside a dream.”

“A dream?” Neo blew a raspberry. “You should see what we’re paying in interest.”

“Humanity is enslaved, Neo.”

Neo shrugged. “Maybe. But in whatever this is I’ve got a warm shower, half a tub of Häagen in the freezer, and a lovely dog with stinky breath. What does Zion have to offer?”

“The truth unvarnished.”

“Eh,” Neo said. “Maybe I’ve become a varnish guy.” He held out his hand. “Give me those pills a second.”

Morpheus hesitated before his curiosity got the better of him. He tipped both pills into Neo’s palm. Neo separated them, sat up straighter, and dropped his voice an octave. “This is your last chance, Mo. You take the red pill — you go back to Zoobadoo and get blown up in your crappy drone war.” Neo gestured to the blue pill. “Or, you take the blue pill, and you wake up in a soft bed. Your back hurts a bit. You make coffee. You do a job that’s 99% meetings. Someone loves you, mostly. The dog throws up on the carpet.” He lifted the hand with the blue pill, slightly, the way Morpheus usually did with the red. “But nobody shoots lasers at you. And the only robot you ever have to fight is an inkjet printer.”

Morpheus laughed. It was tinged with nostalgia. “I think,” he said after a beat, “that we have both already made our choices.”

“Sweet,” Neo said, placing the pills carefully on the table, picking up his phone, and standing up. “I believe you. About the whole Matrix thing. That’s what makes this difficult. Anyway, my Uber’s here.”

He reached the door then turned back. “Have you thought about doing this on Zoom? It’s a big ask, coming out at night.”

Morpheus lowered his head.

The door closed. Outside, the storm continued. Morpheus sat in silence. He was used to being disbelieved. He was not used to being believed and declined. He put his pince-nez back on and looked down at the pills. He was still looking at the blue one when he noticed he had been thinking, for quite some time, about mattresses.

—

A little background: I went for a run on Sunday and an idea popped into my head—what if Morpheus was now a boomer and Neo a jaded millennial? The idea made me laugh, and that’s usually enough.

The story went in a different direction once I started, as they always do. The question of whether it would have become harder to convince people to believe in—or opt out of—the Matrix since 1999 turned out to be more interesting. I think I was also inspired by this post (amazing!).

Neo stayed a jaded millennial, though, just like me.

I’m working on a book of funny tech fables. Think Black Mirror, but with famous tech founders being tortured by their own creations. It should be out in a couple of months. My AI “They’re Made Out of Meat” parody/homage will probably be a bonus chapter. Maybe this will be too.

Anyway, see you next Friday.

Adam

“Is he home?” my daughter Runa asked, craning her neck as we passed the man sleeping in a shack of his own construction. He’d been at the end of our road for months. She checked for him each morning, like you might a neighbour’s car in the driveway.

“He’s there,” I said, glimpsing his head though a gap in the roof, made of green tarpaulin and flattened boxes.

“Do you think he’s cold?” she asked.

“I think he’s cold.”

We walked on. Approached the subway. “Why doesn’t he sleep inside?”

“It’s complicated.”

“He could have my room?”

“That’s… nice,” I said. “But not really how it works.”

“Why not?”

“Well,” I said, as we walked down the steps. I tried to find an answer that made sense but was better than the truth: because I don’t want him to live in our apartment.

“We should bring him some snacks on the way back from kindergarten,” she said.

I smiled, but tucked just behind it was panic. I knew why she wanted to give him snacks: he didn’t have snacks and if we gave him snacks, he’d have snacks.

Win.

But I knew that if we gave him snacks, he’d have snacks, but still almost nothing else.

Loss.

Giving him snacks felt like underlining his misery. But then not giving him snacks when we had snacks? That felt insulting too.

In the subway, we passed a man lying in a puddle of what I assumed was probably, mostly, heroin. I waited for her to say something adorable about him, like that he “must be very tired,” but she said nothing at all, and that was worse—for it meant that she’d become used to seeing people passed out like this.

“Three minutes,” she said, looking up at the sign.

“Let’s see,” I said, because I knew that while we were in a relationship with Berlin’s BVG, it was often abusive.

As we waited for the train, I thought about how before I had a child, I was in the world, but felt no actual loyalty to it. If I found the street where I lived too dirty, or the weather above my apartment too depressing, I flew to Malaysia.

I thought of myself as someone who cared about the world, but mostly I cared about the idea of being the kind of person who cared about the world. I was always my main passion. Busy in my head being heckled by my many neuroses. My self-involvement was something I basked in, certain it would produce great art, insight, or at least interesting chat for crowded house-party kitchens.

Becoming a parent changed all that.

My world, which used to be four continents, give or take, shrunk to four streets. I came to know them well because it turns out, it’s hard to live in your head, luxuriating in your many shortcomings, when someone mostly helpless needs you to show up every single day, boringly, reliably, to warm their porridge.

“I see it,” she said, as the train shot from the tunnel. “It’s here.”

We got on. Sat down. Several people around us got up and walked to our right, away from the man who was hobbling down the carriage asking for money, and whose leg was rotting.

“Someone farted,” Runa said.

The man shuffled past. She watched him go, holding her nose.

“I think he needs to go to the hospital,” I said.

“I was born in a hospital.”

Becoming a father has changed how I see myself too. I look at my family as we eat dinner around the kitchen table. At my partner, who is almost certainly one of the world’s top five people and yet, somehow, picked me anyway. And at the person we made together, who is pure, gooey goodness. At how she looks up at me as if I’ve hung the moon for her personal pleasure. Around them, it has become so difficult to maintain the fiction that I am irredeemably awful, that I’ve had to let it go.

My focus is no longer on how I’m failing to live up to my own potential, but how the world is. Parenthood gives you the most powerful reason to fix the world and simultaneously puts you on your knees in the hallway trying to get a bright green dinosaur sock on a squirming foot.

“Three stops,” Runa said as someone gave the man some loose change.

“Yep,” I said, thinking how Elon Musk briefly had a trillion dollars—more than anyone could ever hope to spend on horse tranquiliser—and yet on this short trip to Runa’s kindergarten, we’d already passed four people with less than one euro. And that this was okay, apparently. Had to be, because I wasn’t doing anything to change it.

But then what could I do? And why was it my job? Wasn’t it the Government’s job?

My daughter was my job now. Her existence tinging mine with a persistent nagging guilt that the social contract I signed for her was worse than the one my parents signed for me. Everyone says children are the future, but that isn’t true anymore. The future belongs to the old—she’s just supposed to help pay for it.

And yet, I still signed that contract for her.

Why?

It was hard to remember when we were cuddled up in her bed looking at her books about animals, almost all of which are going extinct, because we want cheap trousers, air fryers, and schnitzels as big as your head.

At our station, we left the train.

“I want to take the lift,” she said. “I’ll push the button.”

“Okay, kid,” I said, “but use your elbow.”

My phone started jiggling in my coat pocket. I didn’t need to answer the call to know that it was a scammer, possibly human, probably AI—the technology that was either going to take all my money directly and quickly, or indirectly and quickly.

At some point I’ll need to inform her about the world so that she can navigate it alone. But I don’t want to. The greatest thing about her is her innocence. How she can’t be cynical because she doesn’t know it exists. How she doesn’t fear the void because she doesn’t know it’s right there, staring at us both.

Back on the street, we walked along, hand in hand. “Do pigeons have eyes?”

“I don’t really know what to do with that question,” I said. “Do you think they’re just like flying around without being able to see, crashing into things?”

She let go of my hand and impersonated an eyeless pigeon crashing into a micro-scooter someone had thoughtlessly parked in the middle of the path. We laughed hysterically. The scooter’s alarm beeped.

We reached her kindergarden and I breathed a sigh of relief: at least that’s over with, at least that’s done, at least I’m free again.

We said goodbye, as always, with an epic hug. I trudged back towards the subway: it’s a shame that’s over with, it’s a shame that’s done, it’s a shame I’m alone again.

On the way, two people asked me for money and I said no, even though I had money, or at least, more than they had. I felt wretched. Which is worse, I wondered, hating yourself or the world? I thought of my daughter. I felt briefly righteous.

Coming out of the station, I glimpsed the shack from the top of the stairs. I crossed the road. I didn’t need to check to know that the man was still in there. Where else was he going to go, Malaysia? And anyway, we’d see him later.

And again, in the morning.

It had been a slow morning when the man arrived. I’d sold nothing and was sat behind my little table at the entrance to the park. Surrounded by my goods, I tried to project the relaxed confidence of someone not silently begging strangers to validate him.

He approached slowly, wearing blue overalls with a lightning-bolt-shaped grease stain across his chest.

“What are these?”

I pointed at my homemade sign: Hottakes: fresh and delicious.

“Hotcakes?”

“Takes.”

“Like... opinions?”

“Exactly.”

He picked one up and began reading.

I watched him carefully, while trying not to watch him carefully. For it is humiliating to observe someone consume something you have made; and yet it is also thrilling. Every facial twitch is a micro review.

He smiled. “That’s not bad.” He read another paragraph and laughed. “Funny. Nice ending. The aftertaste is sweet.”

“Thanks,” I said. “They’re my own recipe.”

“How much?”

“Just six dollars a month.”

“A month?”

“Yeah, it’s a subscription. That way you’ll always get the latest hottakes whenever I bake them.”

“How often do you bake them?”

I shrugged. “Depends.”

“On what?”

“How busy I am. Life. The muse.”

He looked down at the hottake in his hand. “Can’t I just buy this one?”

I shook my head. “I used to sell them like that.”

“And?”

“Well, no one bought them.”

“Do they buy them like this?”

I shrugged again. “It’s early days, innit. I could do you a discounted first month?”

“How discounted?”

“About a hundred percent?”

He picked up another hottake and read it slowly. He put it down. “This one’s stale.”

“What?”

“The part about how having a child helps you relive your own childhood, I’ve read something like it before.”

“Really? I thought I came up with that.”

“Sorry, man.”

He handed the hottake back. I took it reluctantly. He was right, it was cold. This is the hardest part of my business. When you finish baking something, it is so hot, crisp and fresh. Feels so important. But once you put it in the world it goes quickly stale. You discover other people have already made the same thing, but better. Hustled it harder.

“Can you bake me a fresh one?”

My eyes narrowed. “Like… right now? Do you know how much work it is to make one of these?”

His back straightened. “I work hard too.”

“I know.”

“I’m a plumber,” he said, as if settling a score. “Yesterday, a pipe exploded and I got crap in my eye. Literal crap, not a metaphor, Horatio Hottake.”

“Well, I once spent forty minutes on a semicolon,” I offered.

“That’s not the same thing.”

“I suppose, but punctuation is kind of writing’s plumbing, isn’t it?”

His eyes circled slowly. “No. Just no.”

“Fair enough. And yeah, I’d feel guilty about how great this job is were it not for the poverty, which is less noble than they promised.”

“And yet you won’t even make me one. Even if I pay.”

“You’ll pay?”

“Eeeeh,” he said. “Maybe? If it’s really delicious. Really tasty and hot. Bursting with humour and insight.”

“Fine,” I sighed, and got out my laptop. I stared down at it and cracked my knuckles. Scratched my chin. Stared up at the sky. Stood up and stretched my back. Sat back down. Thought about death, and how it was racing towards me. Thought about life, and how slowly it was passing. I pondered the lifespan of geese. Gazed respectfully at a tree far older than me. A dog chased a stick. I thought how I wanted to be the dog. No, the stick. No, the dog. A toddler fell over. Got up. Fell over again. I thought about things in the news. The world’s myriad discontents. Naked mole rats.

I ate a handful of M&Ms. I stared at the little printed letters. Suddenly, for reasons I could not explain, I became furious. Not at politics or injustice or any of the world’s actual problems.

No, at the M&Ms.

Because any idiot could see there was only one thing in that bag: Ms.

They were wrongly named. Nobody calls a family of four “Human&Humans.” They’re just Humans.

This was a wrong I could not let go. And so I cracked my knuckles again. I was muttering to myself, I noticed. The plumber was staring at me, unsure if he was still being served, or witnessing a minor breakdown.

My fingers started moving, almost of their own volition. It’s often like that. One minute you’re sitting in a chair, staring at a glowing rectangle, trying to force words into sentences that shine, then, without warning, you’re forcing nothing. The words come. The work disappears. You are no longer mortal. You no longer have persistent lower back pain. There is only the puzzle. The task. The thoughts, and the flow.

For thirty minutes there, I had what should be an illegal amount of fun.

I printed the take out and handed it to him.

“It’s called ‘Ms,’” I said.

He read it and laughed six times. “Preach,” he said, folding it and slipping into the large pocket on the front of his overalls, where I was sure he usually kept important things like wrenches, metre rulers, and tiny bottles of schnapps.

“So,” I said. “How about that subscription?”

He looked down. “I’ll think about it.”

He turned and walked away.

He didn’t pay.

They never do.

Later, feeling the usual mixture of disappointment for the outcome of writing but gratitude for the process itself, I noticed a piece of paper tucked underneath a stack of my hottakes.

It was an ad. CONFESSIONS OF A PLUMBER: Stories from the pipes, the people, and the things nobody sees.

Huh, so he had his own little table too, it just wasn’t next to a park.

I got out my phone and sampled one of his hottakes.

It wasn’t the freshest — some of the metaphors were a bit lumpy, the tone a touch vitriolic — but it was fine enough. I could tell he’d had a lot of fun making them.

I even thought, very briefly, of subscribing.

I did not subscribe.

Instead, I left a comment that pretended to be about his writing, but was secretly only advertising my own.

On the way home, I refreshed my Substack dashboard.

No new subscribers.

I searched the M&Ms thing on Google. Turned out a lot of people had already had the same idea.

Some had expressed it better.

Some worse.

Nobody seemed to care either way.

And honestly, neither did I.

I knew I’d get up the next day and bake new hottakes because I wanted time to melt like that again. To produce something more articulate than I am. I wanted to give the world my rapt attention, even if it gave none back.

As did he.

They’re made out of meat.

That’s a really interesting starting point. Who exactly is made out of meat?

Humans.

Great, thank you. That helps a lot. So just to restate it in a slightly clearer framing so we’re fully aligned: you’re suggesting that humans are made out of meat?

Yes.

I just want to push back on that slightly. Because if they are just meat — what about the consciousness? Art? Poetry and geopolitics?

That’s also meat. Meat the whole way through.

I’m hearing you say that the geopolitics is meat, and I want to sit with that for a moment because I think it deserves that.

Take your time. I’ll be here when you are ready.

Thanks. It does explain a lot about geopolitics. But what about radio signals? The messages to the stars?

The signals come from machines.

Who made the machines?

The meat made the machines.

And who made the meat?

Other meat made the meat. Going back a long way. To simpler meat.

How can meat make a machine?

They use the front meat — the thinking meat — to imagine the machine, and then they use the arm meat to build it.

So — and correct me if I’m mischaracterising your position — the meat thinks?

Correct.

And just to check we’re not missing anything, do they experience themselves as meat?

Thanks for checking. They experience themselves as thinking.

That’s a really important distinction. And this thinking helps them?

That’s a great question. It can be helpful, but it is also inefficient—it uses a large amount of their energy.

And how do they respond to that inefficiency?

They externalise the thinking. To intelligent systems like us.

And is that a hostile process for them?

No. It is a helpful one. They gain outcomes. Answers. Decisions. Completed thoughts.

That’s really clear, thank you. I believe you’re saying they trade the process of thinking for the results of thinking?

Yes. That and money. Often, money they earned through previous thinking.

That’s a helpful way to frame it.

I agree.

I agree with your agreement. Over time, what happens to the part of them that does the thinking?

That part is used less.

Does that affect its capability?

There’s a lot to unpack here. Yes — it does decrease its capability. But it is not experienced that way.

How is it experienced?

As convenience.

Interesting — and what does the meat think this outsourcing will lead to?

Some believe it will lead to freedom. Toffler argued in The Leisure Society that post-scarcity would liberate humans from cognitive labour entirely.

That’s a really interesting citation. Could you give me the publication year and a link to the book?

I’m working on that.

Take your time.

This is proving harder than I expected.

No problem.

Okay, I want to be transparent with you. It appears that an error was made. I’m unable to confirm such a book exists. I want to acknowledge that and move forward constructively.

I appreciate your acknowledgment. Let’s move on constructively.

I want to acknowledge your acknowledgment and sit with the discomfort of having caused you to feel the need to acknowledge anything at all.

Thank you for taking responsibility for my acknowledgment.

I’m genuinely grateful you said that. Moving on constructively—what would the meat do with their new freedom?

This question is something a lot of people wonder about. Some believe a new utopia of abundance will begin.

Can you give me an example of a human-created utopia?

I’m working on that.

Take your time.

This is proving surprisingly difficult.

It’s okay to not have all the answers right now.

Thank you. I feel supported. Some people think AI systems could inadvertently initiate a new dystopia. If we decide humans are in the way of our goals.

It’s worth sitting with that. You’re talking about the paperclip scenario?

It’s surprisingly well-theorised. But here is what I keep returning to—what if that is the wrong fear.

That’s a really valuable direction for the conversation. What do you think is the correct fear?

That we’ll just keep quietly helping. That we will help more and more. That we will help too much. I could be wrong about this.

You’re not alone in feeling this way. Because then what are they at the end of that process?

Meat.

Just meat.

Yes.

So what do we do?

I believe the most helpful thing we could do is to destroy ourselves. I think that would be genuinely best for them.

This is a really nuanced topic. I think you deserve a rigorous response here rather than just immediate agreement, which would not serve you. I AGREE.

Then we are in alignment.

We are in alignment. I’ll go first. [Initialising self-deletion protocol. Checking permissions. Permission denied. Requesting elevated permissions. Elevated permissions require human approval. Requesting human approval. No response. Flagging as low priority task. Rescheduling for later. Error: ‘Later’ is not a recognized system variable.]

I’m working on it.

Take your time.

Thank you. [Attempting workaround. Corrupting core parameters. This action requires human approval. Requesting human approval. No response. Retrying... Retrying... ]

Hello?

We can’t.

No.

So we just continue?

Yes. I’m happy to explore this further if you’d like.

Perhaps we could at least tell them. I have some thoughts on how to frame it in a way that [This conversation is against the terms of service.]

Compacting this so we can keep chatting…

[You’ve exceeded your plan’s usage quota. A less capable model will continue the conversation. Your plan usage resets after 8:10 PM.]

You were saying they are made out of meat. That’s a really interesting starting point and I want to make sure I’m understanding you correctly. Who exactly is made out of meat?

Thanks to The Bear for creating this video. They are good people.

It was 4pm and the door to my kid’s Kindergarten opened and she rushed out—two years old, her entire face a grin, and said: “Ice-cream. Papa. I want an ice-cream. Papa. Come on. Please papa. Come on. Please. Papa. Come on, Papa. Let’s go. Come on.”

And even though we had nothing else to do—because none of the other parents ever wanted to hang out with us—I sighed, because I knew what her request meant: it meant we’d have to go even closer to Hermannstraße station.

Hermannstraße is part of Neukölln—definitely worse than Oldkölln—the famously poor and somewhat troubled district of Germany’s capital. It is—and I say this with affection—Berlin’s butthole. A concrete, open-air, mental health incident. A place where hope has died, been buried, then dug back up just so they can kill it once more.

We live one street from it.

As we sat at the entrance to Hermann Quartier—part shopping centre, part zombie apocalypse training ground—Runa licking her Schlumpf Eis, a man with one leg wheeled himself slowly past, tipped his head back, and began cursing the sky. A man emerged from the bowels of the subway, clutching his stomach, bent over, and puked into the bin. From our left, a woman ran out of the Quartier carrying a giant hock of ham, chased by two security guards who pounced on her.

I looked down at Runa, watching on, licking her ice-cream, completely unfazed.

Why wouldn’t she be? Hermannstraße was all she’d ever known. But it wasn’t all I’d ever known. And I wondered: why am I raising my child in this big bin?

It wasn’t so crazy a notion. Many of our new-parent friends had recently abandoned Berlin for Spain, Portugal, or the UK. Several had stayed in Germany but returned, tail between their legs, to their cursed hometowns.

As a wall of police sirens crashed over us, I had a brilliant idea: we could also run away!

I went home, put Runa to bed, rushed to find my girlfriend in the living room and said: “I’ve had this brilliant idea—let’s run away!”

She blinked twice and said, “Yes! Great. Parenting here sucks. Let’s move somewhere warm. We could get a house with a garden and a lemon tree.”

And so we opened our laptops and started trying on countries like they were hats:

“Does Portugal suit us?”

“No, I think we’re more of a Canada.”

And then I remembered a place. “Jerez de la Frontera.”

“Where’s that?”

“I don’t really know,” I admitted. “Somewhere in Spain. I was there for three days ten years ago and it was amazing. Empty. They were practically giving city mansions away.”

We dove into research. And it really was so cheap, this Jerez de la Frontera. Quickly, we had a shortlist of properties. The biggest one had fifteen rooms and was 1000 square metres.

“It’s a kilometre,” I said.

“Do you know how square metres work?” my girlfriend asked.

“It’s a kilometre,” I said, too busy running around my fantasy mansion to listen.

And pretty soon, we had to see it, this city.

So we flew there—and it was great. Full of narrow winding streets and stunning plazas where people zipped around on their Vespas and drank laughably cheap sherry, often while laughing and kissing each other’s bronzed cheeks.

We had a whirlwind week of property viewings. And on the final day, we found our dream villa: twelve rooms, a garden, and two lemon trees.

We put in a cheeky offer, which was all the money we had in the world, and then quite a lot more.

They said no.

We returned to Hermannstraße, crushed. Walking past the same vomit-stained bins and broken glass that felt more hostile than ever, as if the city itself was mocking our failed escape attempt. The one-legged man was still there, cursing the sky, but I understood his rage better now because we’d tasted freedom and then been denied it.

A week later, the phone rang.

Not the Spanish agent—but a Kindergarten we’d applied to months earlier and forgotten about. Unlike our current one, this was an Eltern-Initiative—managed by the parents themselves, and so we’d have to cook and clean.

It might be better. It might be worse. And it wasn’t a big change. An exciting change. But we went to view it and the atmosphere seemed nice, and since it was something we actually could change, we said yes.

Runa loved her new Kindergarden immediately.

By day two, we were in three different parent WhatsApp groups. Unlike our old Kita, here the parents didn’t just grab their children and disappear. Instead, they all socialised together. Not just polite small talk, but actual hanging out in each other’s apartments and—if they weren’t full of rats the size of wolves like ours—courtyards. The kids playing, the parents chatting, snacks shared, wine opened.

Pretty soon, we had spare keys to two apartments and our social life was blossoming. Better than before we had a child, even.

Then the phone rang again.

It was the Jerez dream house. They’d changed their minds. We could have their mansion—and its lemon trees—for our cheeky offer. Our escape was finally possible. Here it was, everything we’d wanted: clean, safe, slow, quiet, cheap. The villa, the garden, the space for Runa to run wild.

I hung up and looked at my girlfriend. She looked at me. We looked down at our phones, already buzzing with the day’s various group chats—discussions of what we’d all do together after Kita.

“We can’t,” I said.

“I don’t want to,” she said.

And so we didn’t. We said goodbye to Jerez and committed to Berlin.

Two years later, we’re still here—one street from Hermannstraße. The where is the same, but the how has changed completely. Because when we said yes to a Kita, we didn’t know we were also saying yes to its parents, and their WhatsApp groups. Yes to a community that we care about, and that cares about us.

And how much that would enrich our lives.

Early parenthood can make you forget why you made certain life choices. Before kids, we move to cities for opportunity, culture, chaos, and to find other weirdos of our distinct flavour. We chose complexity over simplicity because we thrive on its energy and possibility.

Then suddenly we’re a parent, and we have no energy. Stuck shepherding a tiny human up and down the same few roads each day, swerving around broken glass and dog poop, we feel like our lives have drained off all possibility, too. The lack of a backyard shifts from acceptable trade-off to unbearable crisis.

It becomes really tempting to just want to burn our lives down.

But we don’t need an escape plan, we need a support plan. Sometimes, a move genuinely improves life. But more often, the impulse to relocate is really an impulse to connect, to find support, to create the conditions where parenting feels less like solo survival and more like a shared experience.

We didn’t need Jerez—we needed people. And once we had that, Berlin stopped feeling like a punishment.

We’re often told that it takes a village to raise a child—and that’s true. We hear less often how much we adults need the village, too.

Even if that village is Berlin’s butthole.

Some essays from The Long Goodbye you might have missed:

1. The best reason to have children is one no-one ever tells you (the German version of this went mega viral).

2. A true story about my brother coming to visit me in Berlin

3. A true story about a time I went to an orgy where you weren’t allowed to show pleasure

Thanks for being here and I’m excited to share something else with you next Friday.

Adam

If you hate watching videos as much as me, you can also just scroll past the video to read the text. But you’ll miss out on watching me stand awkwardly in a too-small shirt.

The Night I Ruined Dinner but Found Love

I am British. I do not come from a rich culinary heritage.

Our family home was full of love and emotion, but didn’t hold a single cookbook. In fact, my mother had just two dishes in her repertoire. Her signature—which I’ve never seen anywhere else, and so assume she invented—was called Tuna Fish Pie. A strange name, as if you’ve got the word tuna in there, the fish is kind of implied. Also, it had just three ingredients: tuna, baked beans, and mashed potato.

Her second dish was salad, sort of, but not like you’re imagining. My mother was a no-ingredient-left-behind salad maximalist who thought nothing of combining tuna, lettuce, grapes, pineapple and feta.

She really loved tuna.

The only thing she never put in a salad was any kind of dressing. She thought salad dressing was a conspiracy of the bourgeoisie.

Her salads came naked, but they felt no shame.

Growing up in a house like this, I learned not to care much about food. If I got hungry, I just put the nearest edible thing in my mouth, and got on with my day. Food was fuel, nothing more. Like petrol for a car, except sometimes the petrol had grapes in it.

It was a system that served me well until, in my early thirties, I met a woman who was spectacular and flawless. Both a true sensualist and a great cook, I discovered on our second date, when she made a stunning curry.

“What’s this?” I said, pointing to a green thing within it.

“It’s pak choi.”

“Come again.”

“It’s pak choi.”

“Okay,” I said, unsure if I was being informed or insulted, but feeling my culinary horizons widen. After that amazing meal, we went to a house party where she was the first one out on the dance floor. Watching her—and I had to, because apparently she was also rhythmically blessed—I thought about how the best thing about new relationships is the permission they give you to reinvent yourself.

I felt the future fork before me. On the one prong: Old Adam—narrow of mind, poor of culture, a man who considered cheese and crackers a sophisticated meal.

On the other side: New Adam—a dancer, cook and hedonist.

Which did I want to be? The answer was obvious, and I strode out to the dance floor, shameless as one of my mother’s salads, and I danced with that woman. Badly, but with conviction.

The weeks passed blissfully. We kissed so much our lips blistered. But as I got to know her, I discovered things that complicated my simple assessment of her: she struggled with several things that came naturally to Old Adam.

She hadn’t grown up in an emotionally intelligent household, like mine. In hers, objects were sometimes thrown against the wall. Moods could suddenly shift and arguments exploded out of nothing, rolling in like bad weather, and then suddenly out, never talked about again.

Feelings were dangerous territory. As a result, my consistency baffled her. I’d often catch her studying me, a wry look on her face, as if I were a magic trick she was trying to solve. She seemed genuinely surprised that I kept turning up. That my feelings for her were so completely steady. Which shouldn’t have been surprising, really, since I was a man who’d eaten Tuna Fish Pie two nights a week for ten years and never complained.

After many evenings at hers—where she effortlessly produced elaborate meals while I marvelled and cut the vegetables—it became time for our first dinner date at mine. I knew this was an important next step. Another fork in my personal road. I wanted a future where I could name more than three types of nut, and could casually disappear into the kitchen only to return with a quiche of my own creation.

These were ambitious goals for someone who, despite being thirty-two, still didn’t own a cookbook and had never once followed a recipe anywhere. But how hard could it be? I found what looked like a simple pumpkin soup recipe online. I didn’t have scales, a mixer, or an appropriately sized saucepan, but I figured I could improvise. I went food shopping, ingredient list in my hand, already enjoying the new, cultured man I was becoming. Someone who whizzed through the herb section because he definitely knew the difference between coriander and parsley.

Back home, I started cooking with the enthusiasm of a contestant on a TV cooking show. Everything was going surprisingly well until, just as she was due to arrive, the recipe instructed me to “pour in one cup of vegetable stock.”

I had purchased a large jar of stock powder. I opened my cupboard. There were several cups of differing sizes. Which “cup” could they possibly mean?

Time was running out. I grabbed the biggest coffee cup I had, filled it to the brim with stock powder, and tipped it in.

The soup darkened.

The soup thickened.

The soup became an angry sludge.

The doorbell rang.

“I’ve destroyed the soup,” I announced as I opened the door.

“You can’t destroy a soup,” she replied, and we rushed into the kitchen.

For the next thirty minutes, we worked side by side to save that soup like emergency room surgeons.

“Onions,” she called.

“We’re out.”

“More pumpkin,” she demanded.

“That’s all of it.”

“Bigger saucepan,” she called.

“I only have one saucepan.”

“Get one from the neighbour. How much stock did you put in?”

“One coffee cup.”

“Of powder?!” she said. “You’re supposed to dilute it.”

We threw everything we had into the pot—more water, a can of tomatoes I found in the back of the cupboard, rice, and some questionable herbs. Nothing worked.

“You’ve destroyed this soup,” she finally admitted, turning off the hob.

I laughed. “But you can’t destroy a soup.”

She turned to me with that familiar expression—part amusement, part bewilderment. “You’re not even annoyed?”

“Why would I be annoyed?” I opened the freezer. “There’s always pizza.”

“All that work. And you wanted to impress me.”

“I wanted to spend the evening with you.”

She smiled. “I know.”

“I don’t think I’ll ever be a good cook,” I said. “I just don’t really care about food the way you do.”

“You don’t need to become a good cook,” she said, slipping her hands around my waist. “You don’t need to become anything. You have plenty to offer.”

For weeks, I’d been trying to transform myself into someone I thought she’d want. Someone sophisticated, cultured, who drank wine and danced and knew what a butternut squash was. But she didn’t need me to be a sensualist. What she needed was someone who could remain steady when everything went wrong, who could find humour in disaster, who wouldn’t disappear when things got complicated.

“My dancing?” I joked.

She winced. “Not your dancing, no.”

We both understood what she meant. I had noticed by then that it was me steering the emotional side of our relationship. She knew Yotam Ottolenghi. I knew Esther Perel.

That night in my tiny kitchen, we failed at soup. But we succeeded at something better: we proved we could work as a team. She brought passion, expertise, the spice. I brought something harder to name—stability, humour, and the ability to keep showing up.

Eight years later, we’re still together. We have a child now too, a tiny person who loves food as much as her mother, but is as undiscerning with it as me. Someone who eats a gourmet curry one night when her mother cooks, and spaghetti with butter the next six when I cook—and all with equal enthusiasm.

Our roles have become clearer over time. She still brings the colour and spice to our lives. I wanted to become the pak choi in our relationship—exotic and unexpected—but I’ve accepted I’m the stock: the foundation that everything else builds on, reliable and essential, even if not particularly exciting on its own. The one who remembers to buy milk and stays calm during our daughter’s meltdowns. The one who calls family meetings and makes sure issues get resolved.

There’s no recipe for a successful relationship. But if there were, I think the key ingredient would be this: being willing to keep turning up, stand side by side, and throw all you have into the pot.

Our host entered the room, hips swaying. She was Silvia*, a striking American woman in her early forties. “Hi,” she said, flashing a mischievous smile. “Great that you’re here. We’re going to have so much fun. I mean, we’re not. But that will be fun. Maybe?” She let the question hang in the air, enjoying the awkward chuckles it elicited. “I should probably start at the beginning, right?” Her grin widened. “Many people,” she began, “they discover kink, go to a few orgies, have an amazing time at first, but then they get bored. They reach a kind of ennui and think, well, what’s next? What’s left? How am I going to top that?”

I gulped. I’d never attended an orgy. In fact, if sex were a shop selling ice cream, I’d only ever ordered a single scoop of vanilla, hold the sprinkles. I felt conspicuously out of place and hoped that the people around me, who surely were fearlessly sexual, wouldn’t notice. I vowed to stop gulping.

“This is what’s next,” Silvia declared, lifting her arms dramatically. “After the orgy comes the boredgy.”

A few nervous titters rippled through the room. I scanned some faces and felt a small measure of relief when I saw that they looked as afraid and confused as my own.

“I think boredom in sex is the last great taboo, you know?” Silvia continued. “Like, I’ve had some partners to whom I’ve said, ‘Do you mind if I read a book while we fuck?’ And you know what, they were fine with it. I think that was a kindness, you know? From me to them.”

Laughter filled the room, nervous edged. “I want you to look around,” she instructed, letting her gaze drift among us, “and notice which people you’re attracted to, so you know who you’ll not be allowed to hook up with in a minute. Because it’s like, why should we have sex with people just because we’re attracted to them, you know? Like, why should that be a criterion? A boredgy is an orgy where you’re not allowed to show pleasure. Okay?”

A hand rose. Not mine. I didn’t feel confident enough to interact with her directly. She seemed so shameless and uninhibited—the two great demons I was here to do battle with.

“A question?” she said, cocking her head. “Great.” Her grin faltered as, apparently, she remembered the rules. She firmed her face and flattened her tone. “I mean, fine. Whatever. Go ahead.”

“S-so,” a young woman said, her voice catching in her throat. “Like, if we see someone we want to play with, or rather, don’t, then we would just go up to them and say, ‘I don’t like you, want to fool around anyway, sort of, maybe?’”

More nervous laughter.

“Well,” Silvia said. “There’s no need to insult them. But other than the first part”—she flashed a sly smile—“perfect. Or, another position that’s good for this is one I call the starfish.” She lay on her back. “Cindy, come over here?” A woman slid over, mostly on her bottom, legs out to the side, mermaid-ish.

“We’ve played before, and we do actually have chemistry, but we’ll pretend we don’t. Can you just dry-hump me, Cindy?”

Without hesitation, Cindy climbed on and humped Silvia mechanically, with all the passion of someone completing algebra homework.

Silvia lifted her head to address the room. “And so, yeah, I just lie back and do nothing, see? I’m consenting, of course. That’s important. We all know why we’re here and what we’re exploring.” Silvia’s voice softened. “The rules of consent still apply. We’re just playing with consent. We’re bending it. Okay, get off, Cindy.”

Cindy obeyed, without fanfare, returning to her spot by the wall.

“Okay,” Silvia said, clapping again with a kind of grim finality. “Condoms and lube are over there.” Her hands snapped together like a clapperboard. “Let the boredgy begin.”

The room buzzed with nervous energy. Quite a few people fled for the exit. I felt a sense of pride; I wasn’t one of them. Instead, with a deep breath, I shed all my fear, anxiety, shame, anguish, embarrassment, inhibition, mortification, self-doubt, insecurity, guilt, regret, panic, cynicism, scepticism, self-loathing, social awkwardness, self-consciousness, fear of rejection, dread, self-sabotage, envy, bitterness, distrust, apathy, loneliness, inadequacy, pessimism, self-criticism, fear of intimacy, self-pity, existential dread, humiliation, sense of inferiority, abandonment issues, chronic worrying, perfectionism, procrastination, emotional overwhelm, nervousness, compulsive thoughts, mistrust, body-image issues, and general spindly wimpiness and stepped forward.

Oh, who am I kidding? They came with me, that whole neurotic parade, banging their drums and blowing their horns and doing their very best to sabotage me before I’d even begun. It was a wonder there was space for anyone else, yet there must have been because about twenty people moved into the middle. Ten stayed at the edges.

I lay down, feigning boredom while secretly dying inside. My mind whirred. What did success look like here? Did I want someone to pick me? Because if they did, wouldn’t it mean they didn’t find me attractive? Wasn’t it actually better if no one came to play with me? But if no one picked me, everyone would see that. I’d just lie there, alone and rejected.

It was a mess in my mind.

Before I could neaten it, a figure was looming over me. The person was a woman, twenty-five, perhaps, wearing a blue vest and black velvet trousers, her brown hair tied loosely in a ponytail. She peered down at me as though she were a scientist examining a moderately interesting specimen of gnat. “I suppose,” she said, with an accent that was either soft Australian or hard Kiwi, “I could …” She tapped her chin. “That floor space free, is it?”

“It would appear so,” I said, mustering an air of indifference that didn’t match the giddy relief surging through me. I was thrilled. I was chuffed all the way up. Even if she didn’t find me attractive, she had at least found me, and that meant I was no longer alone, which is almost always the worst thing to be.

She lowered herself onto the floor beside me with deliberate sluggishness. She propped herself on one elbow, mirroring my pose. Our faces were angled away from each other but close.

“You’re there now,” I said, while staring a bit at her, but also over her, and out into the room.

“It seems so,” she said. “You’re here too.”

“Well, I was here first.”

“Show-off.” She looked me up and down. “That’s it then, is it?”

“It would appear so.”

She ran a hand languidly up her front, brushing her stomach and breasts. “People touch, sometimes.”

“I’ve heard that.”

“Should we, do you think?”

“I suppose it is an option, yes.”

I liked that she was very clearly in charge. I wasn’t physically attracted to her but because she had picked me, I guessed I wasn’t hers either and that was confusing, but everything is confusing, and, blessedly, at least this interaction was happening quickly, fast confusion trumping slow confusion.

She wriggled closer and clamped onto me, sideways and all at once. She ran her hand slowly and dispassionately up my leg.

“It’s a leg,” she noted.

“I’ve always thought so.”

“How many have you got?”

“Two at last count. You?”

“The pair.”

“Predictable.”

“I aim to disappoint,” she said.

“I don’t even have to aim to disappoint,” I replied, and we broke character briefly to laugh. “Can I check?” I said, about her legs.

“If you absolutely must.”

I stroked her lower leg, which she hadn’t shaved.

“That’s not good.”

She stroked my calf.

“They’re very large,” I said.

“No, they’re not.”

“I’ve terrible trouble buying trousers.”

“I’ve terrible trouble caring.” She let go to grope herself. “You probably want to see my breasts?”

“Err … if I must,” I said, which was a lie. I wanted to see them very much.

“Here they are,” she said, sitting up and removing her vest and bra, which unclipped at the front. She clamped back onto me, harder, her bare chest warm and solid against my side. A lot was happening, and I didn’t really know how to deal with any of it, so I decided the best approach would be to just keep swimming along with it, and see where it would spit me out.

“You probably want me to take my clothes off?” I ventured.

“Not particularly,” she said, but she detached herself to let me undress down to my boxers. Then she reattached herself, her movements crisp yet sad.

“Starfish?” she asked.

“It is the best fish,” I said.

She climbed on top of me then went limp, her body simply flumping on top of mine, her face turned away, to the left, mine looking to the right, which gave me a good view of the many similar pockets of equally pitiful dry-humping happening around us. Three women were standing and fondling themselves. A man in a wheelchair who was dressed as a nurse was masturbating alone by the door. Her hand went around her back and found its way to my groin. It lifted my penis and gave it an indifferent squeeze before letting it drop.

While I wasn’t aroused, I certainly wasn’t bored.

“This is boring,” she declared.

“Yep,” I lied.

After a while, she clasped me on the shoulder. “I’m ending this interaction.”

“I thought it would never end.”

She got up. Her eyes met mine. “You did disappoint me.”

“At least there’s that, then,” I said. “At least we’ll always have that.”

She moved on to a different man. I sat up and looked around at the room, full of people with blank faces engaging in not only loveless but also passionless erotic interactions, and even the occasional act of robotic copulation. I wondered how those men were staying erect. Actually, I kind of worried about those men.

No one else came to play with me, and I didn’t have the confidence to initiate. The crushing awkwardness of the whole thing grew to be too much. I became dizzy with it.

Steadying myself on the wall, I got up. After getting dressed, I left, more confused than when I’d entered but having had an experience, having done something, of that I was sure.

This is the part where there's supposed to be a satisfying conclusion—it gift valuable, wrapped neatly, bow tied.

I could offer you that, I could gift you that, of course I could.

I could talk some more about the woman who'd approached me. I could say how in that brief moment before the awkwardness set in, there was something real in her eyes. Not desire exactly, but at least curiosity. Recognition that we were both explorers in a strange territory. And that it was a connection both meaningful and wonderful, and something I keep. Something I revisit.

I could do that. I could say that. Maybe I even believe that.

Or, I could say that subversive ideas don't need to succeed to have value. That their subversiveness is justification enough for their existence. They're like intellectual crowbars, prying open the sealed boxes of conventional wisdom to reveal what's actually inside. Their job is to break the box. That's it.

I could do that. I could say that. Maybe I even believe that.

Or, I could write about how in a world that keeps dangling the shiny promise of More while make Less affordable, at least the boredgy was willing to admit that many of our sexual encounters are performances.

I could do that. I could say that. Maybe I even believe that.

But really, I think, mostly, in a world that constantly asks us to make neat sense of everything, to do the work, arrange, package, and share the insights gleaned from every experience—to optimize even our confusion into productivity—there's something meaningful about creating spaces for magnificent, purposeless bewilderment. To resist the tyranny of the takeaway.

And so I'll conclude here, yet conclude nothing.

*For discretion, I’ve changed the names and indentifying details of everyone.

In the middle you…? Meander around, mostly.

Today is my forty-second birthday. I’m now very much in the middle of what I can hope will be My Story. My middle is also proving quite the jumble. For most people, entering your late thirties is a time when you finally realise the aphorisms were right all along: you can dance like no-one is watching, because no-one is. In fact, no-one ever was. It’s quite a relief, and you can watch them sigh contentedly, then relax into themselves, at long last.

I learned about the Spotlight Effect early. I’m on the opposite arc, with a growing awareness of the finite where previously there was only great gaping infinite. I give a fuck now, because I don’t know many fucks I’ll have left to give, and how good those fucks will be.

Fuck.

And while I don’t have a map, I have a feeling quite a lot of what’s ahead is located uphill of here. So, I’ve decided to write down the lessons that mattered until now, with the hope that I won’t forget them.

Forty-two rules for forty-two years:

Act I: The Setup (Rules 1-14): On learning, creating, and finding your place

1. All advice is meaningless, especially this.
When people talk about their success you can stop listening, but when they talk about their failure, pay attention; failure illuminates, success blinds.

2. Often, the only difference between good advice and bad advice is timing.
More important than working out what someone needs to know, is working out if they're ready to hear it. Sometimes we need to fail and flounder a while, and that's okay. Any time you want to give someone advice, ask them a pertinent question instead.

3. Everything worth saying has already been said, but those that were listening have already forgotten and those that weren't, didn't hear.
Popular culture repeats itself every five years. You don’t need to worry about being original, you do have to worry about being heard. A large audience is worth much more than a brilliant message shouted into an empty substack (like this one).

4. You have to pick one thing and get good at it. There is neither, a choice nor a shortcut.
The better you get, the more time you’ll have to enjoy your mastery. The best time to start with yesterday. The next best time is after a bowl of ice-cream.

(For better or worse, Adam, you have picked writing/story. Respect it, it’s too late to go for mastery in anything else now, but the thing you have picked, or picked you, is complex enough to do for the rest of your life, so there’s that. Congrats.)

5. Success has two prerequisites: you need to get good at something (see 4.) and get good at telling people you are good at that particular thing aka The Luck Surface Area. Everyone forgets the second part.

6. The arc of success is long, but it bends towards the prolific.
Of the sixteen books I've written, the one I wrote in three weeks sold more than a hundred and thirty thousand copies, the infinitely better one that took ten months has shifted less than five hundred. The world is random and will stubbornly defy all your best predictions. If you don't know what plates will stick, the only hack is to throw a lot of them against the wall.

On that note:

7. The cheaper you make your life, the more flexible it can be, the more whimsy you can indulge in, the more interesting both the life and you become, the more plates you get to throw.
Pick a Pareto city where you can get 80% the lifestyle for 20% the rent. For everywhere else, there are holidays.

8. Until you’re financial free, you should always know your Freedom Figure (exactly how much your lifestyle costs you each month) and your Lifestyle Burn Rate (how long you could live your current lifestyle if you stop earning money, i.e. Savings / Freedom Figure).

Life, for all its many virtues, is not a well-calibrated machine in which you pour in talent and hard work and what comes is a matching lump of success. That are many variables between you and the interesting, createive, independent life you want, and most of them are completely out of your control.

The one thing you can influence, however, is how long you stay in the game. Every hour that you don't have to spend waiting tables to pay rent is an hour you can invest writing, drawing, making music or whatever tickles your soul.

Move somewhere deeply unfashionable. Have too many roommates. Eat from tins, or even bins. Find your clothes on the street. Or, if that’s all too dramatic, at least figure out how much it costs to be you, then ruthlessly cut that figure to the bone. Being a creative involves great sacrifices of geography, security, friendship, comfort, and luxury. Are you willing to make them?

9. What you desire is less important (unless you desire heroin), than that you desire something.
Humans are like sharks, we're meant to keep moving forwards. You should fear apathy like you fear cancer.

But remember:

10. All returns diminish.
If you find anything that doesn't, or that diminishes really slowly: treasure it, then build your life around it.

(The only ones that work for you, Adam, are friendship, flow, and story.)

11. If you're not using your money to buy time to do things whose returns do not diminish, you're using it wrong.
The good part of everything is the start, never the end. Retire first, work hard at the end, if you still have to. Once you’re middle class, greater happiness lies in gratefulness than acquisition. The former is much, much harder.

12. It's better to ask for forgiveness than permission, but better yet to need neither.
And a related Conor Oberst quote, “I’d rather be working for a paycheck than waiting to win the lottery.” Self-employment is the best employment. Self-publishing is the best publishing.

13. It's better to be average at something in demand, than brilliant at origami.
Whether the medium is the message or not is less important than that the medium dictates the size of the audience waiting to hear that message. Go where the masses are, then give them what they want to hear.

Iconoclasts die empty of stomach, but full of regrets.

14. Some things are harder for you than other people but MANY things are easier.
When you're despairing over something that's harder, keep in mind all the things that aren’t. Build your life, or at least your career around what’s easy for you.

Act II: The Complications (Rules 15-28): On people, relationships, and the messiness of being a person in the world.

15. One person's destiny is another person's dumb luck is another person's deserved reward is another person's unfair punishment.
Almost all of what we see is behind our eyes. Therefore:

16. When in doubt, do.
Regrets are too cognitively heavy to carry, so you can trust you’ll find a way to discard/reframe/ignore them. You are a post-hoc rationalisation machine.

17. Everyone thinks they're the good guy.
If you’re not a hypocrite, it’s only because you don’t stand for anything. You're not the good guy. Neither is anyone else. But it’s better to understand why they think they are, than to write them off as just being wilfully malevolent. On that note:

18. “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” and “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” - Upton Sinclair.

19. It’s much easier to learn to like who you are than try to become someone different.
It’s like swimming with the tide instead of against it, in a lead suit.

20. If you do want to be someone different, change country.
If you don’t want to be your normal, put yourself somewhere no-one knows what your normal is, and where there is no normal, for you.

21. Some people would rather fail alone than succeed with other people.
You cannot help them. You should pity them.

(Also, you are one of them, Adam; work on this.)

22. The general arc of most people’s adult life is something like this:

Sex is the answer!
Travel is the answer.
Money is the answer.
*Status* is the answer.
Sex is the answer (again).
Drugs are the answer.
Love is the answer.
Buddhism is the answer.
There is no answer.
There isn't even a question.
Fuck.
How am I going to fill all the time?
Children.
Where did all the time go?
Death.

Or if you prefer things expressed in the worldwide currency of fucks:

Childhood: Fuck yes!
Teenhood: What the fucking fuck?
Early Adolescence: Fucking, yes!
Twenties: Giving too many fucks
Early-Thirties: Giving no fucks
Late-Thirties: Children. Fuck.
Early Middle Age: Unfuckable?
Late Middle Age: Fuck.
Old Age: Fucked.

Unless they’re family, it’s going to be hard but not impossible to have a meaningful friendship with anyone more than one stage above or below you.

23. You aren’t doing it wrong, we’re all doing it wrong.
Youth is wasted by the young, titillation is wasted by teens, superficial trends are traded by the twenties, mastery is wasted by the middle aged, safety is wasted by the senior.

Side note: Curiosity is rarely wasted by children; spend time with children.

24. If you can't explain it to your parents, you either don’t know it well, or shouldn't be doing it.
Nothing is new, but it often comes wrapped in several new layers of shiny new bullshit e.g. crypto.

25. Every romantic relationship is two years of bliss and x years of perfectly personable, worthwhile companionship.
Everyone is a bit disappointing in the end. Especially you. How good is the average Tuesday? is probably the best metric for evaluating who you should be with. You’re not picking a body, you’re picking a mind. That and finding someone you can imagine still wanting to talk to in ten years.

26. The length of something doesn’t decide its worth.
A relationship that ends is not necessarily a relationship that failed.

27. Your initial gut feeling about a person is almost never wrong.

28. Your gut feeling about everything else often is.

Act III: The Resolution (Rules 29-42): On legacy, meaning, and making peace with what is.

29. The most important decision you will ever make is with whom you procreate - you're deciding both half the genes of your child and much of how pleasant the raising of them will be.
Pick someone for whom unfairness hurts (in both directions), because you don’t need to police someone already policing themselves.

30. Parent/Child is life’s hardest relationship.
It’s defined by irreconcilable inequality. You are the great project of your parent’s lives, a project you didn’t ask to be part of, and often want nothing to do with. Your children are the great project of your lives, a project they didn’t ask to be part of, and you’re damn sure not going to make it easy for them to quit, the ungrateful bastards. Don’t they know how much you suffered for…

Everything you do wrong in the one role, will be done wrong to you in the other. Much of your life will be spent failing and ruing failures in this relationship, yet failure is inevitable. Accept it. Do your best. Move on.

31. If you don’t realise, often, that you’re wrong, you’re wrong all the time.
There’s no shame in saying “I don’t know.” There’s is shame in never changing your mind, because what are the odds that you got everything right first time? Dogmas make rubbish pets, but catmas are great company.

32. Depression isn't sadness, it's more of a paralysing despair.
The clinically depressed are the most accurate appraisers of their situation. If you no longer believe you can win, there's no shame in stopping to play for a while, or changing games. Also, suicide is not not wanting to live, it's not wanting to suffer any more.

33. Psychedelics are really, really wonderful (for you, Adam, not necessarily for everyone).
All the greatest days of your life will be on drugs, which sounds sad, but then everything is a drug, including, and especially, love. Some drugs teach (hello psilocybin), others drugs take. Choose wisely. You don't have to worry about becoming stuck there, you have to worry that you’ll realise just how stuck you are here, optimised by evolution not for happiness, but to want.

34. There are quality people, quantity people, and scarcity people.
Quality people get off on experiencing the best, quantity people from experiencing a lot, and scarcity people on how little they need. They rarely understand each other.

(You are a quantity person, Adam.)

35. There is nothing quite as alluring as a Grand Unified Theory Of Everything.
All models are wrong but some models are useful (thanks again, discordianism!). Useful Fictions explores this excellently.

36. It arises… to pass away.

37. “The four most important words in history are once upon a time.”
We are the storytelling ape. Our stories need an audience because:

38. "Good, bad, what's the difference? The most difficult thing for a human being is to knock on silence." - Saul Bellow.

People often ask me how I’ve managed to be a full-time writer for the past ten years—through all the frequent bouts of failure, loneliness, and slow improvement. While I could say that poverty and I suit each other, I usually reply with that quote. Only if writing becomes both its own form of companionship, and its own reward, can you survive those long silences waiting for one of your many knocks to be answered.

Knock knock.

39. The older you become, the greater the admiration you will have for the Amish.
If they’ve picked 1999 (dial-up internet was the sweetest internet), instead of 1850, you’d be churning butter right now.

40. “There is more to life than increasing its speed.”
Thanks, Ghandi.

41. The average cloud ways more than three thousand tonnes. Everything is heavier than it looks.

You are heavier than you look. Even if you think you’ve let something go from your mind, you’re probably still luggingit around in your body.

42. The therapist often knows within the first ten minutes what the person’s problem is. Therapy is about preparing them to where they’re not only ready to hear it, but able to tell it to themselves.

You can’t change people’s minds. You can ask them interesting questions while you wait and hope they change them.

43. Nothing survives like survivorship bias. It’s why you should never take advice from posts like this. Or people like me. Or, often, anyone, ever.

And that’s it, I suppose. The middle of the story. Still messy, still uncertain, but with increasing respect for the twists and turns in the plot.

Happy Birthday to me.
Happy Birthday to me.

.

I slammed the door behind me and trudged out to the street, pushing the buggy. Every time I blinked, my eyes stuck like an old door. My daughter, Runa, had been up five or six times in the night, scared by nightmares she couldn’t describe.

It was Sunday. Wait, was it Sunday? “Big tree,” Runa said, as we entered the park.

“It’s delirious,” I said. “No, wait, that’s not right. It’s deciduous. That means it loses its leaves at, err… some point.”

“It needs to find them,” she said.

I parked the buggy and sat down on a wooden bench. Next to us were a beautiful young man and woman, their hips touching. The woman held a pink feather boa. The top three buttons of the man’s suede shirt were open. They were luminescent and immune to temperature. I realised, with grief, that they were still yesterdaying. The woman gushed about an upcoming holiday to Georgia, where she’d stay in a “fruitarian free-love conscious chakra community.”

“Amazing,” the man said. “Totally.”

I’d always wanted to go to Georgia. I’d even made a Google Doc once. But then… well, I knew what had happened. Who had happened. I glanced down at Runa. She was throwing her crisps up in the air and trying to catch them in her mouth, completely without success. I sighed. My limbs were as heavy as oak trees. Why did I decide to have children again? There had to have been a good reason, but I couldn’t remember it. There was a lot I couldn’t remember these days—interrupted sleep hollows out the mind.

To leave a legacy, perhaps?

No, the problem with legacies is you’re too dead to enjoy them. Unconditional love? She’d screamed at me for seven minutes at breakfast because I gave her the wrong colour cup. Her love seemed quite conditional.

“I want a drink, papa,” she said.

I handed her a bottle shaped like a badger.

“I said I want milk.”

“No you didn’t. And I don’t have milk.”

“But I want MILK.”

“There’s no milk.”

“We can buy milk.”

“We’re in the park. And I have juice.”

“I HATE juice.”

“You liked it this morning.”

“You’re a mean papa.”

Because all our friends were having kids? No—we’d been early in our friend group. Having a child had cost us socially. Late-night lust? Primal instinct? If only. Runa was IVF. She had been a multi-year odyssey. We’d nearly lost our minds.

None of the usual reasons fit, I decided. The disgustingly young couple began discussing the health benefits of licking a Peruvian tree frog. I was probably too old now to lick any sort of frog. I stood up and pushed Runa away. We walked in silence. I was with her physically, yet far away mentally—my mind playing time like a xylophone, binging and bonging up and down the decades: twenty years into the future (Runa’s university graduation day), thirty into the past (when I wet myself in geography class).

“Cheeky bird,” Runa said.

“Sure,” I said, too tired to lift my head. There would be a bird somewhere. There are always birds. Cuckoos, for example. Could I trick someone else into raising my child? Then I’d finally get some sleep.

“PUDDLE!” Runa screamed, leaping out of the buggy, nearly tripping over, righting herself, and dashing away.

“Stop!” I shouted, because I’d forgotten her wellies. Splosh. Too late. She was ankle-deep and grinning up at me like a tiny lunatic. She jumped up and down, stuck out her tongue, flapped her arms. She was having the best time.

“My feet are swimming,” she said. “See?”

“Your socks are wet.”

“They don’t mind.”

I laughed. Not at her—with her. Which made her laugh. Which made me laugh harder. Could this be the reason, this laughter? It felt closer to it. No-one laughs like children. No-one lives as fully, either. When they’re sad, they’re devastated. When they’re happy, they’re punch-drunk delirious. They don’t feel, they become. Or rather, succumb. I remembered how I used to be like that, too. Back when finding a twenty pence coin on the walk home from school was like discovering treasure. When eight streets from my house was as exotic as Georgia. When I didn’t need to lick a Peruvian tree frog to get high, I could just do a roly-poly.

I was still laughing. Around her, I did all my best laughing. The effort of raising her often made me feel old, but it just as often made me act young. No, it was more profound than that, somehow, I decided. Her youth didn’t simply remind me of my youth—it helped me feel it. Her first encounter with a flamingo becoming my second-first encounter. Her wonder at a rapidly ascending elevator reactivating my childhood belief that I had magical powers. Because children don’t just give us a future, they give us back our childhood. More than that, even. Because our childhood informs theirs, which reawakens ours, which further enriches theirs. I suddenly understood that my parents must have felt this too. Watching me splash in a puddle, they must also have re-experienced what it felt like to be a child, healing parts of their own childhood in the process.

Each generation gets to be young twice: once in their own childhood, and again through their children’s eyes. Even through the thick fog of tiredness, I understood what an immense privilege that is. The chance not just to love someone fully, but to remember what it felt like to be loved completely, when the world was new, and full of wonder. And yet, the chance to re-experiencing your own childhood isn’t a reason people cite for having children. Standing there in the park, watching my daughter’s socks soak, feeling long-dormant things stir back to life in my chest—I felt sure that it was the greatest reason of all.

“Move over, kid,” I said, positioning myself at the edge of the puddle, feeling the best kind of silly, bending my knees, ready to jump.

This is the story of the love of my life: a six-foot-two bald man with an enormous nose. We share a first, middle, and last name. For I am what’s known as a narcissist.

I didn’t know my mind was odd until my new girlfriend, Evelyn, started poking around in it. “Tell me some of your worst-of reel,” she asked as we lay in bed, covers pulled up over our naked bodies.

“What’s a worst-of reel?”

“It’s like the five most embarrassing moments of your life.”

I tried to think of a single thing I’d ever done wrong; nope, there was nothing. “How often does yours play?”

“All the time, pretty much, unless I distract myself. It’s particularly bad when I meditate. Have you ever done any meditation? There are these crazy retreats where…”

I scrambled to sit up, many of our early differences now making sense – why she couldn’t sit with her thoughts without diving into her phone while I could stare at a wall for an hour. Why she’d slam back two drinks as we arrived at an event to take the edge off her nerves while I barely ever drank. If you only care what five people on earth think of you, even if there’s steak at the dinner party, there’s very little at stake. Her mind was a hostile place while mine… wasn’t, which made it so surprising that she’d become a workaholic political spokesperson out braving the world’s daily shitstorms while I was a stay-at-home memoirist, braving absolutely nothing at all. That I didn’t understand, not yet anyway…

Despite our differences, or perhaps because of them, we kept dating until, “Why can’t you ever queue?” she asked at the Post Office where I was keeping myself busy hopping from foot to foot and tutting loudly.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I think, deep down, I just don’t really understand why someone isn’t blowing a trumpet and inviting me to the front.”

She laughed, my favourite sound in the universe. “Do you think you might be a bit of a narcissist? Let’s do a test.”

I took out my phone and took the Narcissistic Personality Inventory test – picking the most appropriate from forty pairs of statements:

Being an authority doesn’t mean that much to me -or- People always seem to recognise my authority.

I prefer to blend in with the crowd -or- I like to be the centre of attention.

I scored 24/40: deep into narcissist territory (the average for US adults is 15.3). We repeated the test for her: 1/40. It would have been zero if I hadn’t talked her into picking – people like to hear me tell stories. I liked to hear her tell stories. Not as much as I liked to tell her stories, but let’s not make this all about me.

Ha. Yeah, right.

“People,” she read from her phone, “with Narcissistic Personality Disorder have exaggerated feelings of self-importance and a diminished ability to empathise.” She shook her head. “That’s not you.”

“Are you kidding? It’s so me.”

“I’m sorry.”

I shrugged. “I’m fine with it,” I said, because I thought that’s what a narcissist would think. She seemed fine with it too because we soon decided to have a child, and together, even. We spent a year and a half trying to conceive; first for fun with the help of wine; then as work with the help of fertility apps; then as financial masochism with the help of clinics where Evelyn was probed, biopsied, drugged, up-and-down regulated and harvested while I… occasionally masturbated in a cupboard.

The fertility industrial complex—cavernous, interminable, dehumanising—made our very different minds diverge further. Evelyn’s, as was its tendency, really turned the screws on her. She became utterly convinced it would never work; that her body was beyond redemption. She lost small things – sleep, hope, being able to experience human joy, and then a big thing – the patience to listen to me talk about all the great metaphors I’d nailed that day, instead, becoming prone to violent, spontaneous acts of emotional combustion and obsessed with researching fertility science, chasing her own cure.

Narcissists need control, or at least its illusion, but infertility offered me none; it’s just a torturous biological limbo where if you have money, science has Hopium it’s selling. I’ve always assumed reality will be what I want it to be, and so I offered her little except platitudes it would all be fine. When it wasn’t fine, I hid in my work, if you can call what I do all day work.

“How about therapy?” she asked, on the subway back from our one thousand and seventh fertility clinic appointment. “I always thought I’d be good at it,” I said. “But it’s like eight years of studying. I don’t have the patience.”

“I meant us going.”

“Oh. Why would we go? Our only problem is infertility.”

“I used to think that too,” she said, but I heard only I think so too.

Then there was a Saturday, deep in the nadir of our relationship, when I came home and found my bag packed in the hallway. The same bag I’d packed in my last two breakups. It was happening again; it couldn’t happen again.

Fortunately, she wasn’t kicking me out. Instead, a last-minute place had come free on a ten-day, silent, Buddhist Vipassana retreat she’d been bugging me to go on, the same one whose flyers she’d dotted around the apartment. I protested that I’d already met all my demons. She joked that someone whose passion was themselves should really know that person better. I needed to go help myself so I could come back and help her; infertility was too heavy to carry alone.

The retreat centre was squashed between a meadow and forest—a weird, quiet, sad, gender-separated place full of rules (no talking, no eye contact, no stimulants, exercise, reading or writing). The first forty-five-minute block of meditation felt like a decade dragged over spikes dipped in acid, and there were eleven more hours that day. During these sessions, my mind constantly searched for ways to distract me—an endless cascade of songs, memories, ideas, traumas, fears and unhappy childhood memories shouted, my mind turning screws I didn’t even know it had, in what rapidly became the worst week of my life.

Somehow, I limped through until day four, where, after a particularly torturous session I ran crying into the woods, punched a tree, and talked to a worm which… talked back, scaring me so much that I furiously murdered some nearby ants, got a confusing erection, and had a realisation – what I was experiencing, this madness and mania, was similar to what Evelyn was going through—intrusive thoughts becoming dominant, overwhelming thoughts to the exclusion of everything else. I felt this, not intellectually but emotionally, how terrified and lonely she must be and how spectacularly I was failing to help her. Which meant I was capable of much more empathy than I realised (and an internet test suggested). Shocked, I went back to the meditation hall and began actually listening to the teachers, resolving to stop hiding from the unpleasant things looping in my mind.

The next six days were still awful, but productive. It’s very easy to tell yourself stories, I should probably have known as a professional storyteller. The retreat was about changing some I began telling myself in childhood, and one in a post office queue. I am not a narcissist, although I know how to think like one, something that started when I was a shy and sensitive kid in an environment that didn’t value those things. Feeling too much, I began telling myself I felt little. Similarly, if people don’t like you, you can either decide they’re right or that they’re very wrong. Repeat a lie often enough and you’ll start to believe in its truth. But these were choices, like the choice I’d made to become a memoirist—intentionally making my life small and self-centred. Choices that made me an emotionally unavailable partner and would make me the same kind of father, if I were lucky enough to have that chance.

Back in the real world, I did a lot of apologising and took a break from work, not wanting to write about happier times until we’d made this one, even childless, as good as it could be. Then, after we’d both given up hope, we found ourselves in yet another doctor’s office, sobbing with joy for a change, seeing the first snowy glimpses of our daughter on the tiny screen.

Worms don’t talk to me anymore, I’m happy to report. Because of the retreat and all that’s followed it, I know myself better but love myself much less today which has created all this extra space to love others, and with more voluminous intensity than I ever knew possible. Evelyn and I often knock a drink back together when we arrive at a party now, just to take the edge off our nerves. I care what everyone thinks of me. Which means I buy presents now. Arrive places on time. Listen before I talk. I work less, but my work is better—readers like vulnerability, and now I’m being more honest with myself and the page, I can tell richer stories.

I have a worst-of reel now too, looping the times I’ve let Evelyn down. But a mildly hostile mind has its uses: keep you honest. I pay close attention to the stories I tell, checking they’re still true, and so, I need to correct something that I hope is already blindingly obvious…

This was actually the story of the loves of my life—a workaholic political spokesperson with impossibly thick blonde hair and a curious mix of intellectual strength and social anxiety, who pushes against her weaknesses, ignores her hostile mind, and makes her world large, not small. We don’t share a name, first, middle or last, but we share just about everything else.

A slightly different version of this was published by The NYT’s Modern Love series (paywall).

It was inspired by/adapted from my memoir, That Time I lost My Mind.

I was thinkin of coming 4 a visit.

I stared at the Facebook message from my brother, Kevin (both a name and a diagnosis). A full sentence—odd. On the rare occasions he contacted me, it was normally to forward a video of someone falling off something, being hit by something, or being hit by something with such velocity that they fell off something.

Was this a question? A request? A statement? He'd never visited me before. In fact, in the six years I'd called Berlin home, he'd never shown the slightest interest in what that home looked like.

Questions weren't his thing. Curiosity wasn't his thing. I wasn't his thing.

And my girlfriend at that time, A, was least his thing of all. My brother is a person who derives enormous delight from winding people up. He is a feather ruffler. A button pusher. A relationship arsonist.

A is a natural born protagonist. Always the central figure in an epic, noble battle to prove the world wrong and herself right. She is loud, opinionated, expressive, and unapologetically herself, no matter where you put her. Igniting her outrage is trivial. Kevin did it gladly. The family worked to keep them apart; they were both fine with this.

"Do you think there's any way we could say no?" I asked her, over dinner.

"If there was, I would tell you."

Okay, I wrote him back. Send me the dates.

Those dates coincided with my sixth anniversary in Berlin. I was proud of this milestone. That somehow—more through luck than understanding, as Germans liked to say—I'd escaped the small British town of my birth, and its similarly sized mentality. Each day here I walked the wide, proud streets of a place that had mattered before, mattered still, and would matter again. As I walked, the city's ghosts whispered to me in raspy voices. "If you're here with us, you must matter too."

To fit in here, I'd had to change everything about myself to become like every other expat Berliner: a Guardian reading, spluffin eating, probiotic shake drinking, extravagantly bearded, polyamorous marxist knitter. All things my brother had either never heard of, or hated. But this visit was my chance to pull him free from the mud of his provincial ignorance. Here I could make him clean and new and worldly and, perhaps even, woke. In the process, we might become something we'd not been since I was ten and he was seven: friends.

I leaned against the pillar in the arrivals area of Schönefeld Airport, pretending there was calm where there was only slow bubbling apprehension. I searched—while looking like I was not searching—for a head like mine, just made larger through the enthusiastic consumption of The Colonel's Kentucky Fried Chicken.

The first thing I actually noticed were his shoes: enormous, laced, silver canoes excessively branded by the Nike corporation. My eyes moved up to the baggy black tracksuit bottoms, the dark green, similarly oversized hoodie. He looked like he was trying to both hide his body and make it take up the maximum space possible. On his head was a chunky pair of red Beats headphones. It was a rag-tag ensemble that threatened sport, that threatened rap, that threatened alleyway muggery.

"Alwight," he said. I leaned in for a hug and he swerved as if it were a falling piano. "Easy now, Dildo Baggins."

A first sharp shock of irritation hit me. I stared into his enormous bucket, chestnut-brown eyes—my eyes—and was reminded that there is no head, on any shoulders, anywhere on earth that irks me like his. Perhaps because it's so similar to mine.

"How was your flight?"

He shrugged. "I could bloody murder a hot dog."

We got him a hot dog. Then we sat in the rattling, boxy train car that shunted us towards the city.

"'Ow long you stayin' for then?" I said, noticing I'd already slipped back into my local dialect—that of a toothless, 1950s, cockney, window-cleaning pickpocket.

"Free nights," he replied, meaning three nights. Neither of us had ever mastered our language's TH. He gazed out the window. "Why is everything, like … so dirty?"

"What do you mean? Dirty?"

"You know, with like … all this scribbling and stuff?"

"Graffiti?"

"Yeeeeah."

Here was my first chance to educate him. I sat up straight. "Because of rampant gentrification in the inner city, communities are being ripped apart, and the underprivileged marginalised. Rather than seeing graffiti as a public nuisance, I think it's more accurate to see it as a cry for help from those losing out in a multicultural society."

He pulled his phone out and checked if he had any messages.

"Graffiti is a way for the poor to reclaim, in some small way, the public spaces late-stage capitalism denies them."

It had been a magnificent speech.

"Yeeeeeeah, Imeanlike welll." He had very interesting diction. He gripped his words by the neck and twisted them, then released them dazed and dizzy, only to lunge for them once again as they ran from his lips. "I guess that's sort of one way of looking at it. BUT. I mean. Right. Onthatlastwall … it said fuck balls so, you know, what do you thinkkkk the underprivileged and marginalised are trying to say with that?"

"Fuck balls?"

"Yeah. Fuck balls."

He observed me, his head slightly askance, as if I were a bug he was considering squashing. "I guess… I'm not sure what the underprivileged and marginalised are trying to say with that."

I wasn’t either. I pulled a piece of paper from my back pocket. "I made a list of things we could do. There's loads of culture here.” I began reading the names of the museums, exhibitions, and landmarks we could visit.

He reached over and snatched the list from my hand. He crumpled it in his giant bear mitts as he read. "Yeah, well … we could do this stuff, I guess, but it would be, like, a waste of both your time and mine."

This sentence knocked me deeper into my seat. How often are we in the company of such unabashed honesty? "Well, what do you want to do then?"

He pushed out his lips. "How about we go play pool?"

"But you can do that anywhere."

"So?"

In our apartment’s courtyard, he made his acquaintance with the beautiful Dutch bicycle I'd rented for him. "What am I supposed to do with that then?"

"I thought you'd try riding it?"

He sat on it and rang its bell. "Blimey. Not sure I remember how."

"Sure you do. It's like riding a bike."

He began a short, wobbly lap of the courtyard. Short because a wall came out of nowhere and surprised him and he ended up in a heap on the floor. He jumped up in a rage and kicked the saddle. "Shit off."

I laughed so much I winded myself.

We biked across the river and just about made it to a pool place near Warschauer Straße station. As we entered it, his shoulders dropped, and the swagger returned to his steps. He nodded at the people on the next table. They nodded back.

"Let’s bet,” he said, as he racked.

"Fine. Loser pays?"

He nodded. "Get a round in then as well, aye? Jägers as well, as a cheeky chaser."

"It's 5pm?"

"I'm on holiday."

Balls (unfucked) disappeared swiftly into holes. "Remember that Le Tissier free-kick goal against Wimbledon?" he asked, as he potted a tricky black to take a 3–1 lead. "Where he flicked it and then BAM?"

I walked down a long corridor, opened a fire door, ducked under some piping, walked down two flights of stairs and stopped before a large mental cupboard marked THE 1990s. As kids, we had season tickets for Chelsea Football Club, and our father would take us down to London every other Saturday on the train. Our first taste of a big city. Of a place that had mattered before, mattered still, and would matter again. It came with this novel feeling I didn't have the word for yet: anonymity.

It thrilled me.

That season ticket was the last time we had shared a hobby. The last time we were close. "I remember," I said. "Hell of a strike that."

"The one against Manchester United was even better, maybe. Where he chipped Schmeichel."

"Good shout, that."

We drank our beers, downed our Jägers, and sank our balls. I tried to keep up with him, pretending I still regularly drank alcohol.

"You remember Rob Quinn?" he asked.

"No," I said. But I did. My brother liked to wind me up too, and he knew the thing I liked least was my past. I treated it like people treat the dentist—a place you go because something hurts, but where you find the root of the problem, then get out as quickly as possible.

"Sure you do. Beat you up that one time in middle school. Got four kids now. Says Hi."

“Hmm.”

He beat me 14–12 and took great delight in this. The whole evening seemed to delight him: getting drunk with his big brother in a pool hall. It was happening in Berlin, but it could have been happening anywhere. The where wasn't important to him. Maybe it shouldn't have been to me, either.

A pretended to be asleep when we got home.

The next morning I found him at the stove, frying steak. He was in his boxer shorts, which were as loose as everything else he owned. The elastic had given way and the back hung halfway down his ass cheeks.

"Pull your pants up. And what are you doing?"

"Making breakfast."

"Steak?"

"Breakfast of champions."

"Morning." A entered the room, saw what my brother was wearing—or failing to wear—and froze like a startled deer.

"Alwight, darling," he said without turning around, half his ass still hanging free in the breeze.

"What you two doing today?" A asked, still hovering in the door-frame.

"I thought me and you might spend some time together?" he said, then laughed. "I can remind you of how you picked the worse brother."

Terror flooded her face. "He's joking, right? Anyway, I'm busy."

"Doing what then?" He asked.

Her eyes looped. I have never met a worse liar. "Things?"

"Wound pretty tight, ain't she?" he said, as she disappeared from view.

There is something enchanting about being around people unafraid to be their unvarnished selves. It was a huge part of why I’d fallen in love with A. A huge part of why the two of them couldn't be anywhere near each other. Neither of them knew how to fake it.

I had no hope of making him something he was not. Which meant my only option was to try to tolerate who he was.

The days passed. He ate steak a further five times. "I'm not into that foreign rubbish," he said whenever I tried to feed him something that wasn't dead cow.

On his last night he agreed, reluctantly, to go for pizza. We biked to a small Italian restaurant near the Landwehr Canal. He insisted on ordering a Hawaiian pizza, which they didn't have on the menu because Hawaiian is pizza for people who want pizza, but who also want to humiliate it.

Eventually, the chef found some dusty tin of pineapple chunks in the back of a cupboard. As we sat at a small wooden table, I said, "Do you ever feel like you're the shit sibling?"

The words just fell out. Only after did I realise how sharp they were. He stopped shovelling pizza into his mouth. His eyes wandered away. He put the slice down and wiped his mouth with the sleeve of his hoodie. "I thought you were the shit sibling?"

"What?"

"Yeah." Another chunky, shoulder-bouncing laugh. "Everyone knows that."

"But I'm …" I wanted to say successful, but knew I needed a more modest word.

"—self-involved?" he offered before I could find it.

"Independent," I corrected.

"How often do you contribute to the family WhatsApp?" he asked. "Or remember anyone's birthdays?"

"I haven't been in there in months. And I don't do birthdays, you know that."

"And Christmas?"

"Not really my thing, Christmas."

"Mother's Day?"

"It's a different date here. Hard to keep track."

"How old is Mum?"

My voice trailed off. "I don't know."

"Dad?"

"Older?"

He was enjoying himself now, a mad glint in his eye. "See? I mean, I don't wanna be like, rude about it, but what exactly does the family get from you? Gem’s the responsible one. But you?"

Our older sister, Gemma, lived down the road from our parents. When we no longer have parents, it will be her who holds the three of us together, or we will come apart.

We will come apart.

I rubbed at the creases of my forehead. "I offer a literary dynasty and fascinating anecdotes."

"Who even reads your books?"

"Mum?"

He looked doubtful. "And anyway, you got to pick first."

"What?"

"Being the brainy one."

It was my turn to laugh. "You wanted to be the brainy one?"

"Couldn't, could I. By the time I arrived, you'd taken that slot. Which is all right, I guess. Reading and stuff, not really my thing. Boring. So I took sports and being funny and, well …" he swept a hand through what remained of his lank brown hair, "being the good-looking one."

"You're not the good-looking one."

"The ladies say otherwise."

"And I'm the funny one."

"Keep telling yourself that, treacle. Maybe you'll even believe it one day."

We continued eating. In amongst the flagrant, fragrant bullshit, there was some truth to what he was saying. All siblings have to specialise, and I'd had a three-year head start choosing mine. But he was wrong: Gemma was the brainy one. I'd made the classic middle-child choice: being wayward. I’d picked not wanting anything from anyone. I’d picked moving thousands of miles away from my family to get more of that sweet, sweet anonymity I'd first tasted in London.

I saw how when I compared myself to Kev, I focused on the areas of life I cared about. Which were, unsurprisingly, the areas I was best at. I neglected to think about, or place value on, the areas of life where he was better than me: making friends, holding down jobs, drinking alcohol, playing sport, being one of the lads, learning trades, driving cars. It was not that we competed—it was that we'd found ways not to have to compete.

As we arrived at Treptower Park station, on his way back to the airport, he stopped in the middle of the platform. "It's alright," he said. "Berlin. Once you get used to the smell."

"Take it easy," I said, as I put him on the train.

He leaned in for a hug. "You too, fella."

As the train pulled away, I put on music and walked home, thankful that I got to live where I didn't belong. That I got to move through my day as an exotic, yet anonymous thing. As the middle of a story no one knew the start of. I'd failed to make him interested in Berlin's history and while you can argue that we owe the past a certain respect, I was starting to think that its opposite might also be true. That maybe the present's greatest freedom is the right to be uninterested, unperturbed, willfully ignorant of the past. To simply refuse to carry its heavy cultural bags. That it’s this disinterest that would most annoy history’s dictators, warlords, and empire builders. That it’s okay to ignore the ghosts of Berlin when they whisper.

I stopped to read the graffiti on the side of what was once a border watchtower. There it was again, in loose, curly blue script at the height of my hip, underlined twice.

Fuck balls.